If you're played the "Phoenix Wright" Nintendo DS games you may have noticed that they're a little different.

Part throw-back to text-adventure games, part shining beacon of how funny games can still intentionally be.

Part rare video game coutroom drama, part case study in just how non-interactive a game can be.

Last week I e-mailed Capcom a bunch of questions about the series:

How do these games get made? How do they get so funny? Would they designers ever make a law game in which you only defend guilty people? What have lawyers said to you about these games? And so on...

I wrote up some of the answers in my MTV News GameFile column yesterday, but I found the interview so interesting that I'm posting the whole thing here. Some of the answers were quite brainy, much to my delight.

Two things jumped out at me in the interview. The first is series producer Minae Matsukawa's description of the relationship between the player and Phoenix Wright, the character they control.

We also wanted to betray the player’s feelings. The player may want Phoenix to do one thing, but he’ll do another, even after the player knows what’s really going on. Playing through an Ace Attorney game, you can see that Phoenix is one part the player, and one part his own character, Phoenix Wright. And when the player walks around, they solve the case both with and as Phoenix at the same time. In a way, this case set out to betray not only the player, but also the character Phoenix himself.

The other ties into a comment made by gamer Calvin Smith on a "Zelda" post I published yesterday. He lamented that "a lot of developers and gamers claim open-endedness as a virtue." When I asked Matsukawa about the common critique that the gameplay in "Phoenix Wright" is too linear, she said:

If we were to give players any more leeway ... the structure of the game would fundamentally change. We wouldn’t be able to tell a single story anymore if there were too many paths. Also, what we want the players to enjoy is not so much the solving of each riddle they come across them one at a time, but rather, the ability to use their logic to put together what happened as they collect the pieces of the larger puzzle, as it were, and that’s something that we feel is an important aspect of the game.

Food for thought. The full interview is below.

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Over at MTV News I wrote up an interview with Dylan Cuthbert, the sharp developer of one of my favorite DS games last year ("Star Fox Command"), the best GBA game I've ever played that wasn't released in the U.S. ("Digidrive"), and a fun new racing game called "PixelJunk Racers" that's worth downloading for the PS3.

Hey, at least try the demo.

The column covers Cuthbert's ideas about the wild new "PixelJunk" series, but I kept getting distracted during the interview. I kept asking him about his past. Sorry, but I was fascinated.

See, Cuthbert has an amazing resume that includes, of all things, having his company, Q Games, develop the background silk ribbon graphic on the PS3 and made a lot of tech demos that helped launch the PS2 and PSP. Even cooler is the fact that he's one of the only -- maybe the only? -- westerner to work for Sony and Nintendo in Japan.

The man worked in a 40-man office with Miyamoto back in the SNES days and helped teach the great gamemaker English. He also shared this, excerpted from my column:

What was it like being seated at the far end of the EAD Nintendo office, seated near the bathroom where the rest of the team liked to smoke and test out their English? "They had very strong personalities. All very interesting." How interesting? "They were not the sort to go drinking every night, that kind of flamboyant. They were more very fun and outgoing ... a lot of that comes out in the game. If you've played 'Zelda,' the various postman characters tend to be based on people at Nintendo." What about Tingle, the most eccentric of the "Zelda" universe characters? "That's not someone I know. Someone told me he is based on a person at Nintendo. Where else are they going to get these crazy ideas?"

There's more of that in the column.

On Monday we presented part one of my interview with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. In that interview, Reggie and I talked about stuff I'm sure he expected to discuss.

Today I've got part two, in which I threw some curveballs.

There's video after the jump, but first I need to set this up:

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